My article reached a large audience. A page that gets 500 page views rarely attracts 500 people. Have you ever been interrupted while reading an article and then revisited it to finish up? Is there a blog post to which you frequently refer? People view pages more than once. I probably account for 40 views to Craig Kanalley’s How To Verify A Tweet blog post.

Few people read my article. On the flip side of that first point, your analytics program probably can’t count the people who read your content in an RSS reader or an aggregation application. Worse, the statistics you see probably don’t include mobile apps and might even exclude mobile web page views. Don’t be dismayed by low page views.

Blog post X was not read many times. People don’t always click on a blog post to read it. Because of the format of most blogs, visitors can read posts in their entirety from the main page, or from a date, tag or category archive. Those activities don’t count as page views for a particular post. Please don’t try to force people to click just so that you can get that page view.

My article or post was profitable. If advertising revenue is your main source of revenue, here are just a few numbers you’ll have to crunch to find out if you made a profit: your expenses, the number of ads served and the price of each ad. The formula is often more complicated than that. Simply put: page views might equal revenue, but they do not necessarily equal profit.

People liked what I wrote. Just because people saw something doesn’t mean they enjoyed it.

My post must have started some great conversations. If you ever assumed this with non-digital media, you have to stop now. The conversation isn’t only happening on your site. They’re happening on Google+, Twitter, hipsterrific hangouts, old school barbershops, or just among parents dropping their kids off at school.

If you manage multiple social network accounts for clients, or if you a have a team of workers who are tasked with being socially active, you’ve probably surveyed various tools to monitor the performance those accounts.

Empire Avenue is not billed as a social metrics tool, but after playing it for a week I became more aware of what some of my friends were doing on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and LinkedIn. That’s exactly what I would need if I managed a team of customer service reps, reporters or social media account managers.

At its most basic level, Empire Ave is a stock market simulator in which you build virtual wealth by investing in social people. From Empire:

Every day, you’re on Twitter, talking to friends on Facebook, uploading videos or photos, and writing blog posts. Just for doing that stuff, you’ll earn Eaves – our virtual currency – and we’ll dish out some more virtual cash to your shareholders.

So you gain wealth when the people you invest in engage in social activities. There’s a whole lot more to the game, but the basics are enough to show how easy this game can be used to evaluate and manage your company’s social activity.

Get your whole team to create an Empire account and connect their social accounts.

Invest in those team members and no one else. At first, invest in each member equally.

Check your portfolio every day. If you gain wealth then you know your team is being social.

Sort your portfolio by “gainers” and reward those team members for a job well done.

Sort your portfolio by “losers” and coach those colleagues to become more social.

The biggest challenge I see is that Empire Avenue might be too fun. Since beginning, I’ve divested in my friends (sorry) and transferred those funds into accounts with a higher return.

Oh yeah, another challenge is that your share price isn’t determined exclusively by your social activity. Your price also goes up if people buy more shares of you. So … go to http://empireavenue.com/?t=fvcx1nr0 and add (e)KSABLAN to your portfolio!

Bit.ly: 99

BackType: 794

Armed with my BackType bookmarklet, I decided to go to a fairly unrelated source for some numbers. Oh no, the BackType page for that Mashable post, showed a whopping 794 tweets. That’s more than four times the tweets counted by Bit.ly, Twitter search, and the tweet button combined.

Tweetmeme: 898

When Twitter rolled out its own tweet button, they partnered with Tweetmeme, creators of the old “retweet” button. I wanted to see what the veteran service had to say. The Tweetmeme search for that Mashable post found more tweets than any of the other methods: 898 tweets.

Trust

Yes, this is only one example, and a very non-scientific experiment. But I performed this little exercise because I see these discrepancies all the time, especially with popular posts/pages. Of course, one anecdote doesn’t prove that all counters are wrong, but with so many services disagreeing on one simple number, I simply can’t bring myself to trust any of them to be right.

t.co to the rescue?

One service might be able to provide the one tweet count to rule them all. Sometime this year, Twitter plans to wrap “all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps” within its own t.co URL. It will become part of the Twitter infrastructure. If Twitter can aggregate the many different URLs that are used to share a single web page, then it will be able to provide an accurate count of tweets linking to that page.

Every link shared via Twitter will start with http://t.co by the end of this year. That was the gist of one part of an email from Twitter last night. The most important thing for businesses to note is that, with that change, Twitter will start tracking every time a tweeted link is clicked — no matter what shortener, web site, app or client is used to write or read the tweet. Twitter will finally have an accurate way to measure …

CLICKS: Using a traditional web analytics program to count the number of times Twitter.com sends traffic to a site, is a gross underestimate of Twitter referrals, because so many people click on tweeted links from applications and web sites other than the official Twitter site. Twitter will process and wrap every link — even links that have already been shortened — within it’s t.co shortener, so they can count every time a link is clicked.

IMPRESSIONS: All Twitter applications use the Twitter API, so Twitter knows every time a tweet (and the links within a tweet) is requested. They can’t verify that each request ends up in the tweet being displayed, but this is the best estimation of impressions, the number of times a tweet is shown.

CTR! Since Twitter will have a the number of impressions and the number clicks, they can dived and deliver a fairly accurate clickthrough rate. CTR is used to measure the success of many online ad campaigns.

That kind of information can help shape and measure the return on investment for companies using social media to drive traffic. This is unique information that, if used wisely, can boost an organization’s bottom line. That sounds like the kind of online content for which the Wall Street Journal is able to charge.

What do you think?

Will Twitter start providing these numbers for free, or are they creating the foundation for a new stream of revenue?